Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Now in its seventh major release, Java has lived up to the expectations that accompanied
its arrival. More than 3.5 million programmers have learned the language and are using it
in places such as NASA, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, and the Apache Project. It's a stan-
dard part of the academic curriculum at many computer science departments around the
world. First used to create simple programs on web pages, Java can be found today in
each of the following places and many more:
Web servers
n
Relational databases
n
Orbiting telescopes
n
Personal digital assistants
n
Cellular phones
n
Although Java remains useful for web developers trying to enliven sites and create web
applications, it extends far beyond the Web. Java is now a popular general-purpose pro-
gramming language.
History of the Language
The story of the Java language is well known by this point. James Gosling and other
developers at Sun were working on an interactive TV project in the mid-1990s when
Gosling became frustrated with the language being used—C++, an object-oriented pro-
gramming language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Laboratories 10 years
earlier as an extension of the C language.
Gosling holed up in his office and created a new language that was suitable for his pro-
ject and addressed some of the things that frustrated him about C++.
Sun's interactive TV effort failed, but its work on the language had unforeseen applica-
bility to a new medium that was becoming popular at the same time: the Web.
Java was released by Sun in fall 1995. Although most of the language's features were
primitive compared with C++ (and Java today), Java programs called
applets
could be
run as part of web pages on the Netscape Navigator browser.
This functionality—the first interactive programming available on the Web—helped pub-
licize the new language and attract several hundred thousand developers in its first six
months.
